Dependent origination

In plain terms

The European picture has things, and then causes acting on them. Dependent origination denies the first half.

On this account there are no things that first exist and then enter relations. What there is, is conditions giving rise to conditions - and what we call a thing is a temporarily stable pattern in that, with no independent existence to lose.

The standard formula is compact: when this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises. Nothing is doing the causing, because there is no self-standing item to do it.

Which is why the doctrine and the doctrine of no-self are the same claim applied at different scales. If nothing has independent existence, that includes you - and the two teachings are not separate results but one observation stated twice.

As a philosopher would put it

The twelve nidānas run from ignorance through formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense-bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, and ageing-and-death - a chain the tradition reads as explaining how suffering arises without a self or a creator.

Nāgārjuna's move is the decisive one. He identifies dependent origination with emptiness: what arises dependently is empty of intrinsic nature, and what is empty of intrinsic nature arises dependently, so the two are one teaching. This makes the doctrine metaphysical rather than merely psychological, and it is what distinguishes Māhayāna from the Abhidharma analysis into ultimately real dharmas.

The contrast with Nyāya is sharp: Nyāya holds that substances exist and enter causal relations, which is close to the European picture. The Hua-yan development takes interdependence to its limit with the image of Indra's net, in which every jewel reflects every other, so that each phenomenon contains all the others.

What is actually disputed

Whether dependent origination is a causal theory or a denial of causation.

One reading takes it as an account of how things arise - a theory of conditions, compatible with ordinary causal talk and more careful than it. Another takes Nāgārjuna's identification with emptiness to mean that arising itself is only conventionally real, in which case the doctrine dissolves causation rather than analysing it.

His fourfold refutation - that nothing is produced from itself, from another, from both, or without cause - supports the second reading and has been argued about for eighteen centuries.

The practical objection is the same one emptiness attracts: if nothing has intrinsic nature, what makes one arrangement of conditions better than another, and what is the practice for? The tradition's answer is the two truths, and whether that answer works or relocates the problem is where the Mādhyamika and their critics have always parted.